Tonight we hosted Jack Dougherty’s EDUC 300 course entitled Education Reform: Past & Present.  The students spent an hour or so examining an array of titles from the Henry Barnard collection.  Among those the students used were McGuffey’s readers and spellers from the 1850s; geographies by Jesse Olney from the 1840s and ’50s, and those of David Camp and Joseph Colton of the 1860s and ’70s; Samuel Goodrich’s The young American; or, Book of government and law (1842); and several readers for both young men and women form the 1840s and ’50s.

As is often the case, more interesting conversations come from pairing the students up with a book and giving them a list of questions to answer, rather than standing in front of them and talking for an hour.